Joshua Tree

Come to the desert, she said. It’ll be fun, she said!! So I joined my intrepid traveling besty Laura Kate for some much-needed time away from the frozen north.

For the record, I have been working. Lots of progress on Chapter 8 of the newspaper family saga… I think my writing was improved by the clarity of the air here in Yucca Valley. Laura found this cabinista near an old water tower, so we moved in, left the shades up day and night, and got used to the lack of hot water. (sortuv)

As badly as I want to describe the warmth of the desert thawing me out after a long-stretch locked down at Swanchurch, the truth is it was frickin freezing in the Mojave Desert… I mean it snowed. As in snow. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Posting on his Happy birthday–the greatest hiker of them all, Don Miller!!

the Infrasound then the Silence

One of my favorite reactions to the publication of Proud But Never Satisfied* was from his brilliance Arthur Daemmrich who acknowledged the strangeness of how quiet the world becomes after one’s book is released: “You put a ton of work into a book and then the first response is silence. It takes months for reviews and for feedback and for people to notice it is out there!“

Actually, we’ve been blessed by good reviews so far, thanks to gracious pre-readers; but, in many ways, Daemmrich was spot-on. The distance between writing and publishing is vast. In spite of knowing where you were headed the whole time, reaching the destination is strangely unexpected. It’s like getting out of a car you’ve been driving hard for (in my case) three straight years–long enough to no longer notice the sonorous hum of the highway–then there’s just a deafening silence.

All of the sudden, you’re even not in the vehicle… and that’s when you hear how loud it all was… by not hearing it at all anymore.

Indeed, it feels like I’ve moved to a vacuous planet uninhabited by the infrasound of writing a book… the constant conversation, the noisy notepad near my pillow, and the back&forthing with my sources, my clients, the editors, designers, publishers, and my own inner-circle of trusted advisers whose job is just to get the pour right on a G&T at the end of deadline-driven week.

Nature and my CPA abhor a vacuum, so I’m happy to be back at work on another book commission. Still, I wish I had the courage to hang-out in that silence until I could hear the sound of my voice.

*https://www.amazon.com/Proud-But-Never-Satisfied-Transformative/dp/1622181115/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3VPF558HA53PO&dchild=1&keywords=proud+but+never+satisfied+book&qid=1615822279&s=books&sprefix=Proud+But+Never%2Caps%2C182&sr=1-1

on ice

Kit (my daughter) on the glass… me on the ice.

We Interrupt This Commercial Message with a Deaf Child

Mario Andretti & me on-location for a commercial shoot, Denver Colorado.
More on how the deaf thing all worked out at http://handsandvoices.org/about/seaveraward.html

cold comfort

South Haven, Michigan

the sound of my own voice

It is a phenomenal thing to be paid to write books, and I am thankful every day for this. The business of book commissions and editing takes every ounce of my braingoo so I almost never have time to write in my own voice for my own reasons. But right in the midst of GTS’ing something for a project, this popped up… was 2016 really the the last time I even tried?

timber by Leeanne Seaver | Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Thank you, #AutumnSkyPoetryDaily, for reminding me of the sound of my own voice.

Can I buy back some consonants?

PROUD BUT NEVER SATISFIED began its pre-launch today by our publisher, Huron/The Studer Group.

Alas, I’ve typed the surface off some of the keys while writing this book… apparently, writing about healthcare puts a lot of pressure on “H” and “M” and “N.”

#seavercreative #deliverables #transformativehealthcare #leadership #needanewkeyboardnow

metanoia

1.

the story Lydia used to tell, that one

about sobbing out behind the barn

so she missed the phone call with the

good news she’d waited so long for…

when I got your phone call last October

–His voice telling you CALL HER—

you didn’t even know where to find me

I had this disembodied thought:

 bad news has planted a homing device

in me…has me on speed-dial

                2.

A few months before Jon died, I asked

him to tell me one true thing and he said

he couldn’t say…that he wasn’t sure

he’d ever told the truth about anything

…which was a lie

                3.

There we all were…our poetic fury

our tenderness to each other, our love,

our pathos… and our need to go on living,

to bear the brilliant madness of him…Jenny said

“I want to kick his motherfucking ass”

but I never felt angry…I knew his list

whittled down to scant few real things in

the end…and death was the last thing on it

                 4.

I still wake up in mourning…

the geese pull the gray sheet of

November up over the face of the

cold world…there are so few real things,

really alive things in it, but I know

they are worth living for… at least

I hope I know that

                5.

Spell 161 in The Book of the Dead tells how

to reanimate a soul…by releasing the four

winds…breathing life with written words,

through vigils, chants…by bringing back the light

…surely we have done that, just look

at the life of him we’ve made…just

look at the life he’s made of us

in loving memory of the poet Jon Berkley Wallace who died on this day ten years ago… and we couldn’t stop him
© Liana  10/11 (original post)

The Book of Gabriel

According to her tattoo, the waitress is sinful. The eggs . . she asked me How do I want them?

Actually, the order was put in a long time ago. Life brings what it will, and on that day, it was serving me breakfast with Walter Gabriel Trachsler XIII in a small diner near the Missouri River bottoms of downtown Kansas City. The band he was traveling with played nearby last night, so “he’s with the band” sortuv; more accurately, he’s with the bus.

In fact, the first time I saw him, he was squatting beside an idling band bus drying his long wet black hair in the warm air flowing from as its AC-vents. This will forever remain on my top three “Most Memorable Meetings” list . . . and I’m still waiting for the other two entries.

• 

• 

We hadn’t finished the first cup of coffee before I switched from calling him “Walter” to the far-more appropriate “Gabriel” after hearing the story of his remarkable name. His chronicles from what he’s doing now (spending months on the road driving some band on its tour) to what he did back when he was the rock star cover lot of crucial, incredulous insider-randomania. Since forming his own metal hair band, The Rotting Corpse, in 1985 (with John Perez) he’s performed as musician and mechanic all over the world.

Stories abound . . . Gabriel is the repository of an entire epoch of cultural history with an “I alone survived to tell the tale” sense of duty to the genre.

There are lots of character sketches and sidebars along the way—especially from his childhood. It is understood that he was a challenging kid to a single mom, but the story of how she sent him on a one-way trip in the cargo-hold of a military plane to his even more rascally father (who lived somewhere on a boat near Puerto Rico) deserves to be a movie. I’d never heard “motherfucker” as a term of endearment before, but most of Gabriel’s stories sound like that and are full of lots of things a small-town midwestern girl wouldn’t have heard before.

I was rapt.

Oh yeah, I got stories, he says.

 He’s laughing nowadays, possibly with relief. Everything that can go wrong is something he’s seen before . . . been there, fixed that. Mostly.

There’s nothing he can’t fix if it’s not human, and there have been police-radioed, breaking-news notable exceptions in the latter category.

For those, he’s put pen to paper and written his heart out. Over the years, I’ve saved his missives for the day he’s ready to serious about the great book of his own life. That’s how we’re connected and I don’t let him forget it, because the Muse won’t let me forget it.

There are a lot of people from the past fully present in Gabriel, grateful for his friendship and loyalty and integrity. They’re all crowded around the breakfast table of his birthday today in person or in legend cuz “it’s another fuckin party!” . . . (dis)ORDERS-UP!

Yes, it’s just eggs, but so were we all once . . . then broken, and made a certain way. Gabriel holds this all inside with a raucous reverence and a powerful, gentle motherfukin love.

Happy Birthday, Walter Gabriel, from Leeanne/Liana.

how my garden grows

The leeks I planted have gone to seed.

 

This pleases me to no end because that’s when they’re most photogenic.

That’s how my garden grows, and that’s also how writing goes. A thing gets planted . . . but it often produces a different yet related outcome . . . like somewhere along the way, the question I was asking changed because of the answer that appeared.